“There are some blows so violent—

I can’t answer!”

-Cesar Vallejo

I turned twenty-two on a Saturday, graduated Stanford Sunday afternoon, and that evening caught a red-eye to Houston and then a cab that got me to the brick school in the ghetto at eight fifteen, just slightly late. I hadn’t slept. The room was full of young, bleary-eyed men and women dressed professionally in collared, belted shirts and slacks. The warm air smelled of deodorant and coffee. Everyone stared as I lowered myself to a child’s chair with a complaint of plastic. The black woman in the pants-suit resumed speaking where she’d left off, her voice thick with conviction.

“You do not understand the poverty these children come from, their single-parent families. They will bring their circumstances to the classroom, where it is your job to offer them opportunity. You will think you know what they need. You will not.”

I had a hard time focusing; I could see the woman’s lips moving, but found the words made little sense. It was fine: ethnic studies had taught me all about poverty and inequality, and I knew all about the struggle of students of color. This woman cited no statistics or numbers, but went on and on about children she’d taught, their struggles and suffering. After the session, I wrote on my evaluation card: “Presentation was lacking in sufficient intellectual content.”

Jermanique was easy to dislike. She was chubby-cheeked and had perfect caramel skin— the lightest girl in the class, and so the envy of all the rest. She came to school made up, eye-makeup and blush on a fourth grader, and she wore pleated skirts and blouses with ruffles, not fading polos and hand-me-down khakis wearing at the knees like the other kids. Her hair was always pulled in fresh braids or rows, with different colored bands and balls that matched the color of the uniform. Her bag was Hello Kitty and I disliked the brightness of the pink, the white trim unstained, as if someone laundered it each day. Her pencils weren’t yellow but blue and green inlaid with silver and gold stars and tiny, smiling animals. She spoke with a bubbly, forward-rushing energy, always hurrying to the next bright, happy thing.

“My mama say I can be anything I want, and I want to do everything, everything,” she’d say.

“Well, you may have—choose one or two ‘things,’” I’d say, cautioning her against diffuse aspirations. Here her classmates had screamed going over the one-story highway overpass on our way to a play in Greenwood—they had never been so high. Jermanique had been astonished, then told them about staying on the thirtieth floor of the Hilton in Memphis, the walls all “glass, glass, glass and them bright city lights.”

“How many ‘glasses’ was there? Or did you mean ‘windows?’” Shasprine, my sharp-tongued favorite, cut in derisively while Jermanique wilted. I ought to have interceded, but pretended not to have heard. It wasn’t just that Jermanique’s parents had money, her mother a nurse at the hospital in Greenville and her father—she had a father, which was in itself an oddity—a contractor. It was the way she flaunted what she had, showing off her new leather shoes to an adoring crowd of girls wearing latex Wal-Mart knock-offs, basking in her plenty, boasting about her trips to Jackson and Memphis and the deep blue swimming pools and all-you-can-eat buffets in the resort-casinos of Tunica and Biloxi. It was the way the kids kowtowed to her, not resentful but admiring of her air of bounty.

I especially hated the way she moved. She was sleek and big-bodied like a seal, had this way of applauding her own arrival, clasping her hands and breathlessly announcing what she’d done, what she was thinking, what she was going to do next. Some days, watching her in class, I would find myself frowning at her. Other times, I’d pass her upraised hand for a second or third time, hoping for anyone else with an answer. She was bright and curious and courteous, less of a problem than the rest of my motley crew with their clamor and defiance and rejecting disinterest. Really, she was the model student. She just didn’t need me—she would have been fine in any classroom, in any place, the statistics said. Children of stable, middle-class two parent households were well enough off anywhere.

Each afternoon at three-fifteen, Jermanique’s father picked her up, pulled his white Ford 150 up to the gates of the school and rolled down the tinted windows and called, “Come on, baby,” in his booming voice while the other children looked on. I’d wave to him, as masculine a wave as I could manage—I was never at ease with black men, who always towered over me. When she was gone I’d feel a sense of relief, would take the three or four kids who remained back to the classroom, where they’d stay until five and six o’clock in the sanctuary of my room, away from the dusty streets and grassed lots, the ballcourt with it’s cracked cement and the old men who lingered in the shade, backs leaned to the chainlink fence watching with hungry eyes. Those kids had no other retreat, no air-conditioned cab and waiting father and home with their own bedroom. They sat in my room, talked sometimes about Jermanique and what her Papa has, what she have and do, without jealousy. They harbored only a pure and impossible longing to be her.

I tried to be kind because she liked me. One day in early October Jermanique spent all day beaming at me, finally came to me after the bell. “Mr. Copperman, it National Teacher Preciation day, so my mama sent you some apples.”

“Appreciation,” I corrected.

She held out a white bag with a bow containing an half-dozen red and orange streaked Gala apples, marked with stickers saying ‘Washington.’ They had to be from the Kroger in Greenville, thirty miles away—the Sunflower food store in Indianola carried only pale, mealy Granny Smiths.

“Thanks,” I said.

When she was gone, I gave the apples to the children who were still in the classroom. “Man, these apples sweet. Sure you don’t want none, Mr. Copperman?” Jacqueline Garner said with her mouth full of Gala.

I shook my head. I wanted no part of what Jermanique had.

One afternoon Jermanique’s father hadn’t arrived at three-fifteen. We stood at the gates to the school, sweating in the sun and listening for the sound of his pickup, and finally I gave up and took Jacqueline and her brother Charlie back to the classroom with Jermanique in tow. Her father knew where my room was. The kids were happy to have Jermanique there, especially Jacqueline, the poorest girl in the class, who I’d often seen admiring Jermanique from afar. Jacqueline’s uniform shirts were holed and stained, and often she and her brother reeked of sweat, their clothes not washed for a month and them unshowered because their water was turned off at home. Jacqueline and Jermanique were in the same guided reading group, which was on the third Harry Potter book, and they discussed the intrigue and fun of it, their favorite part of all that magic. “I like how they live there in those big rooms with beds and got spells to bring as much as they want fresh and hot to that big dinner table,” Jacqueline said.

“I just love love love how they go to that dark wood and it so scary but they always come back fine,” Jermanique said.

Love, love, love, I thought as I pushed open the classroom door and set the children to tasks, Jacqueline and Jermanique filing papers and wiping the chalkboard while little Charlie vacuuming the reading rug. I had to keep an eye on Charlie—sometimes things disappeared in his pockets, though I didn’t blame him. I’d passed their house, the porch sagging to the dirt yard, the walls and roof bowing toward the center and the broken-out windows covered in black plastic. If I were him I’d take what I could get.

The children finished their tasks, got more. The minutes passed. Jermanique became a bit anxious, and I assured her that her father was surely on his way. At four-thirty the Secretary appeared in my door, her mouth pressed in a line. She beckoned me into the hall, spoke in a whisper. “That girl Jermanique’s father wrapped his pickup bout a pole on the highway. He ain’t—he passed. Y’all gone have to wait for the girl mother come pick her up.”

My breath left my chest. “Oh, God.” I felt an awful, guilty slide: what had I wished on her? I glanced back in the room. All of them were staring with the child’s instinct for trouble.

“Thank you,” I said to the Secretary. “I’ll stay here until you call.”

I went back in the room, went to Jacqueline and Charlie and put my hands to their shoulders. “It’s time for the two of you to leave,” I said. Jacqueline nodded, and the two of them grabbed their backpacks and went without protest, fleeing what had closed suddenly about the room. I shut the door behind them. Jermanique stood alone, her eyes wild. “What it is, Mr. Copperman? What she say? Where my Papa is? Where?”

I stood with lips working, stricken, not wanting to tell her of the sorrow she was bound for, and no excuse I could make. Just moments before, I had despised the way her mouth turned up, the shine of her teeth, the dimples in her pudgy little-girl cheeks. And now, here I was with her. Here, and no words sufficient for grief.